squabble that feels both crazed and touchingly provincial. This time, having hopped lightly around the globe, pay- ing his brief respects to Siena, London, Haiti, and Austria, our hero winds up fussing about with water supplies at the back end of Bolivia. Is Vesper truly avenged because her beloved James gets to butch it out with the flower-shirted Dominic in what looks like a Ramada Inn? The place is so isolated, and :&amp;ankly so hideous, that there appear to be no other guests, or even room service. Col- lateral damage is minimal, the world is saved, and nobody even noticed. The narrative of Forster's :film is cer- tainly sketchy enough, and early viewers reported a dismaying sense of desicca- tion: no quips, no gadgets, no time to relax. For the aerial dogfight, both planes have propellers, as if Bond were just a throwback to Indiana Jones. He should wear Savile Row suits, but the costume designer puts him in a black blouson and flat-fronted cream chinos, like a slightly precious soccer fan. As for sex, you might as well stay home with a pair of bed socks and a DVD of "Alvin and the Chip- munks." Bond finds a beauteous com- rade-in-arms, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), but she, it turns out, has her own agenda of revenge, and their sole point of con- tact is the kind of kiss that tennis part- ners exchange when they win a mixed doubles. I was cheered by the arrival of Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), an upstanding British redhead, but, after showing Bond her raincoat and her naked back, in that order, she makes an alarming exit. Why, then, days after seeing "Qyantum of Solace," do I find, against expectation, that I can't shake it off? Given that it seems such a diminu- tion of the Bond legend, boiling him down to the bare bones of aggression, what can it bring to the party? The James Bond backlist is, like the history of cinema itself: a trade-off be- tween the real and the fantastic. The best thing in Forster's film is a fabulous se- quence in which 007 takes out a few baddies during a lakeside performance of "T oscà'; the intercutting between his own violence and the melodrama on- stage, meaner and less swooning than Coppolàs similar set piece in "The God- father: Part III," tells you everything about the melding of artifice and pain that has sustained the saga of Bond. I have lost count of the number of times in which we have been offered a darker or dirtier Bond; as M, worried about his sanity, relieves him of duty in the new :film, I recalled the unsavory "Licence to Kill" (1989), whose working tide had been "Licence Revoked." The Bond films have nodded to geopolitics but genuflected toward exotica, and the hero is, in himself, a wild concoction-the free-range spy, roaming abroad in the service of a nonexistent empire back home. There may be intakes of breath, in audiences here, when Bond says that American intelligence services "will lie down with anybody," and when even the temperate M blurts out, "I don't give a shit about the C.I.A.," but how can we seriously ascribe topicality to a thriller that pays no heed to actual foes, such as Al Qgeda, presumably for fear of dent- ing the market overseas? The truth is that one thing alone lends gravity to Bond, and tethers him down to our shared earth, and that is the actor who plays him. This is where Craig and Connery score, and where the oth- ers lag behind. "Qyantum of Solace" is too savage for family entertainment, but, as a study in headlong despera- tion, it's easier to believe in than many more ponderous films. "Everything he touches seems to wither and die," Dom- inic Greene tells Camille, and Bond might well agree. "I don't have any :&amp;iends," he says, more as a statement of fact than as a complaint, and Forster de- liberately surrounds Craig with unmen- acing beta males: pale and flabby types from MI6, plus a bad Boris Karloffim- personator as Greene's henchman. Even the cocktail waiter looks weak and wa- tery. None of them can match 007, let alone reach out to him, and I found my- self relishing his rare flickers of compan- ionship: with the ever more mothering M, for instance, and with Mathis (Gian- carlo Giannini), his rumpled sidekick 1:. " C . R al "" c . h " lrom aSIno oy e. ome WIt me, Bond asks him, with a spectre of a smile, on his way to South America: a request echoed, when they get there, by Ma- this's own distress call-"Stay with me." In the end, though, Bond's closest en- counter is with a traitor, whom he tracks across the roofs of Siena. They crash through a roof: into a building undergo- ing restoration, and tangle together on ropes-swaying in the void and grab- bing for their guns. It is an airy, murder- ous parody of the scene in "The English Patient" in which Juliette Binoche, in the same part of the country, is hoisted high in a church to inspect the frescoes. Art gives life, and more than a quan- tum of solace; but James Bond, aloft and alone, is always the bringer of death. . THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC COPYRIGHT <92008 CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME LXXXI\!, NO. 37, November 17,2008. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for five combined issues: February 11 &amp; 18, June 9 &amp; 16, July 7 &amp; 14, August 11 &amp; 18, and December 22 &amp; 29) by Condé Nast Publications, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. 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